friend June 26 in the lobby of a hotel in Rome.
“It was very strange,” Bertolini said. “He told me he was representing the Kuwaiti government, resolving issues from the Persian Gulf War. It was kind of off the wall.”
Bertolini said Miller also acknowledged that he was having financial difficulties and said the experience taught him that “you really know who your friends are.”
After returning from Europe, the marriage of David and Jayne Miller foundered. Police said the two separated after repeated fights and each sought restraining orders against the other. Jayne Miller said in court documents that her husband had repeatedly threatened to kill her.
Suspicious of her husband’s dealings and debts, Jayne Miller next hired private detective Bob Brown to make inquiries. Brown said Jayne Miller told him her husband had claimed to be a tax attorney in California who moved to Florida to work at Disney World.
Brown made routine computer checks and found David Miller’s name linked with the name Dorothy Miller on car and house titles and tax rolls. He found no record of the couple being divorced.
“I told Jayne that it looked like this guy already had a wife,” Brown said. “It looks like he had two houses, one here and one in California. He had evidently been commuting back and forth between wives.”
Using Brown’s information and old phone records left behind by her husband, Jayne Miller tracked down Dorothy Miller in Pennsylvania and the two confirmed each other’s existence. Dorothy Miller said Jayne Miller told her that she was determined to confront their shared husband and expose him by going to the media with the story of the high-profile bigamist.
“I told her he was dangerous and warned her to stay away from him,” Dorothy Miller said.
Brown said he gave his client the same warning. And her friend Bowen sent her a plane ticket so that she could move back to California.
But Jayne Miller would never take the flight. On Sept. 15, according to Sanford police records, Jayne Miller called her husband and told him she was removing his property from a self-storage locker and that he would have to come and pick it up.
Brown believes his client planned to empty her husband’s property out of the locker and then leave before he arrived. She may also have felt less fear of her husband because a month earlier she had insisted that he turn a handgun he owned over to police for safekeeping and he had agreed to do so.
However, Jayne Miller was still at the storage facility when her husband arrived. According to police, the couple began arguing about Miller’s other wife and he struck Jayne Miller in the face. When she walked to her car, saying she was going to call the police, David Miller calmly walked back to his car and got a handgun, police said.
Miller walked up to his wife’s car and fired six times through the driver’s side window at her, police said. He then walked around to the other side of the car and fired once more into the car, police said. Two cabdrivers who had been called by David Miller to help him take away his belongings said they witnessed the shooting and tried to aid Jayne Miller, but she was dead. They also held her husband and the gun until police arrived.
Sanford Police Chief Steven Harriett said the gun Miller used to kill his wife was the weapon he had checked in at the police station Aug. 27 for safekeeping. However, Miller had reclaimed the weapon three days later. Harriett said the department had no authority to keep the gun from him. “We had no basis to know what he was going to do with it,” the police chief said.
Brown said he doubted his client knew her husband had retrieved the gun before going to the storage locker.
“She would never have gone there if she knew he had the gun back,” he said. “She made a mistake and paid for it.”
Harriett said that while his investigators are aware of the accusations of bigamy and fraud surrounding Miller, they are not actively investigating the suspect’s activities before the killing. “It’s interesting and intriguing, but not pertinent to our case,” he said.
Some who knew Miller believe that more will remain unknown about him than what is known.
“It’s so frustrating,” said Dorothy Miller, who is now living on welfare. “David did a lot of things nobody can explain or that they thought he would never have been able to do. . .